Part I: I Can’t Believe You’re Gone, Leila — A Goodbye Love Letter for My Former Boss and Greatest Mentor on Her 38th Birthday
Reflections and Lessons for Social Entrepreneurs and the People Who Love Them
Note: In January 2020, Leila [pronounced lye•lah, not lay •lah] Janah, a social entrepreneur and Founder of Samasource, Samahope, Samaschool and LXMI, died after a battle with epithelioid sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer. She was 37 years old. The author, Kamrin Klauschie, was Leila’s Junior Chief of Staff from 2014 to 2016. This writing, and the opinions within, are the author’s. The statements herein do not reflect those held by any of Leila’s operating businesses and the author is not currently affiliated with any of Leila’s businesses or foundation.
Language Warning: Leila would want Kam to notify her readers that this blog post contains adult language and cursing.
This is Part I of a IV Series.
Dear Leila,
You’ve really gone and done it now… haven’t you? You’re gone. You’re dead. I guess this means you were human after all. It’s surprising for me to know, even now, that you were human… and I also feel strongly that I told you so. I told you 5 whole years ago, Leila — you were human. I fucking told you so. Fuck, Leila. Damnit. You were human. I told you.
It’s been a few years since I’ve seen your face or heard your voice in real life, but I still have several of your credit cards, your driver’s license, your passport saved in my phone. I still know your social security number, your bra, shoe, and waist size; I still have your home and work addresses memorized as though they are my own. Your sweet little San Francisco cottage remains an unpublished listing in my Airbnb account. I could book you a trip to anywhere you want to go. I could run a flawless board meeting alongside you.
I could organize that overbooked calendar of yours to squeeze in any management team member for that miraculous last minute feedback sync for that overdue project, while using your email account as you to contact every millionaire and billionaire you know, pretending to be you with ease, securing and scheduling every fundraising meeting you might want for the next couple of months.
I could look at your back-to-back meetings today, think ahead, and go get you your salad and green juice on Valencia Street the way you loved. I could style you and arrange your outfit rental for your next big speaking engagement.
You are ever-present and non-existent simultaneously, as you always were. You were the most multidimensional and dynamic person I may ever know.
You were a true fucking force of nature, Leila.
People remembered you as a saint, Leila. They said that about you. Can you believe it? They mourned you in a few short, simple sentences on social media and in blog posts. Did they know so long before I did? Did they know for so long they had thoughtfully, carefully prepared these social media posts about you? And they could summarize their thoughts and feelings in just a few sentences? A few minutes? For you, and your whole life?
It felt like watching the best version of myself I could ever aspire to be, but might actually never be, die with too little fanfare. A wildly insufficient representation of how distraught I felt over the stories and progress that may be lost. This is it? You’re gone? You are Leila motherfucking Janah. And you’re dead. At 37 years old.
You died the same weekend as Kobe Bryant; that was so weird, I imagine for all of us. I imagine for all of us, all of us whom I haven’t spoken with about your death — social media is bizarre that way.
Instead, I sit alone in an apartment in Buenos Aires imagining the queue of individuals around the world, all the souls leading into heaven at that time; and you and Kobe hitting it off, planning some epic workforce training effort in Southern California.
I imagine you coming back from your brief trip to heaven, strutting past my desk and dropping 24 business cards as you pass, including Kobe’s, which I study with great curiosity and pleasure. I remark about how ironic and fascinating it is that you came back from this business trip to heaven with 24 business cards, and you laugh from around the corner, in your office on the couch, after briefly pausing to reflect why I might make that observation — ever the most dynamic and wicked smart woman I’ve ever known.
Too bad this wasn’t one of your business trips, I think to myself.
I do have to say, mourning you alongside the world mourning someone else was truly bizarre, Leila. Mourning you completely alone, so far away from the United States, knowing full well I will probably never join any group event mourning your passing and celebrating your life, as your former right hand person in everything, is perhaps more strange than mourning you at all.
One person from my whole professional network reached out to me to express condolences about your death — our executive recruiter who helped us hire Wendy, now Sama’s Interim CEO — and I couldn’t even muster a response.
I texted Ashley, our former PR and Marketing Lead, Tony, our CFO, and MJ, your former Co-Founder, in total shock, and let the conversations fade because… what is there to say?
I don’t see these people every day anymore, Leila. Neither did you, for all I know. You barely spoke with many of them. You and I barely spoke before you died, for that matter.
You also had beefs. I know, more than most, how you had beefs — real enemies and people who couldn’t stand you in this life.
Plus, these people I used to work with know a version of me that’s at least 5 years old — a version of me in the shitshow phase that is ones’ early 20’s… but I still manage to feel awkward and disappointed in my current self anyway, Leila. I couldn’t muster to do the emotional labor I used to do for you, and for Sama, all the time. I just wanted to sit in shock. I just wanted to feel my grief.
I’ll never forget that text message from my mom.
Reading the Sama blog post in disbelief.
I was at a summer BBQ rooftop party in Argentina working as a temporary teaching assistant in web development, with a slew of people I’d just met, teaching technical subjects with great imposter syndrome knowing I was still barely comprehending these subjects myself.
I sat in shock for a few minutes, surrounded by this loud amalgamation of European strangers — their stupid cigarettes, their typical arrogant elegance, their impressive investment banking and corporate consulting pedigrees, the smoke and the parrilla billowing around us, as we scuffled around this God-forsaken rooftop on those stupid, uncomfortable, universal white plastic outdoor chairs.
I knew full well the tsunami of emotions about to decimate me right then, and throughout the next few days. I knew the tsunami would roll in, and roll in, and roll in… and roll in again, and again uncontrollably in months to come.
It was then I simply excused myself to go hide in a corner and gape — pressing my forehead, hairline, and eyelids as far back as they could stretch with my hands, then eventually, sob violently.
I found out about your death online? You, unstoppable you? No one told me you were close to dying, Leila? I tried to party for a little while — ignoring my eyes becoming so obviously red and swollen, my lips clearly quivering strangely in any half-ass conversation I attempted — to honor you as I felt you would want but I felt more appropriate sobbing in my apartment the whole weekend and speaking to no one.
Most of these letters I wrote to you, Leila, poured out of me instantly while sitting at a few coffee shops around Buenos Aires that weekend.
I decided to book myself a massage at a boutique designer hotel in the city, swimming in the stunning, luscious private pool alone — reconnecting with my body and it’s most basic sensations in a way that have become a survival ritual for me over these few years since I’ve seen you last. I imagined and reflected on much of the idle hours of your adult life being spent this way. On planes, in cars, at hotels — alone.
I’ve felt closer to you tripping on LSD for 10 straight hours in Patagonia— for the first time in my life, obviously, Leila—in the months since. I remember chasing the wild guanacos, those funny Patagonian llamas through a river, each step like a vibration of wild sensation through my body — the sky morphing into a dancing, vibrant painting, the stunning Torres del Paine mountain range as my backdrop, imagining myself to be Pocahontas or Jane Goodall — like I imagined you might.
I remember hiking Mirador Las Torres in an 8 hour fury, listening to Krista Tippet interview Greg Boyle from Homeboy Industries on the On Being podcast — like I imagined you might — chasing you around the bends in my mind as I chased the bends in the trail, with a degree of solitude and grief that I suspect shocked my friends, trailing — unable to keep up with me — playing loud, fun word games together behind me.
You were present there, Leila — in that long, winding, uphill battle and in that extensive, suspended psychedelic peace.
I will say the New York Times and the TODAY Show did a beautiful job of remembering you professionally, impersonally, from a 10,000 foot distance of your 37 year and 4 month life. You built organizations that measurably, demonstrably lifted 70,000 people out of poverty. You were the youngest Heinz fellow and a World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leader. You were likely one of the youngest and one of the first women of color to fundraise many, many millions of dollars for your organizations you started.
You would be proud and happy about this remembrance of you, the positive PR, and the opportunities it generates — I know. It is not enough for me.
Precisely none of it is how I remember you best, or what I mourn. It doesn’t help me conjure who and what we’ve lost. This might be shocking and incomprehensible in the world of public relations, business and entrepreneurship, but you weren’t a list of tremendous accomplishments. You were a soul; a soul we have lost and we can’t ever get back.
A soul I saw, I felt;
a soul I fought alongside…
and with, let’s be honest.
I don’t miss our work, Leila. It is an odd and troubling thing to admit for someone who has aspired and fought hard to break into this work and to stay in this work in social entrepreneurship for over 10 years now. It is especially troubling because I am only approaching 30 now, and do find myself hypocritically hoping to have plenty of decades of good work ahead of me.
Nevertheless, if I’m very honest, I don’t think I’ll ever miss the work I did with you. It was hard, really hard. You had no preferences for making it any easier, Leila. I don’t miss our quarterly goals, our daily check-ins, the board meetings, on-screen and in print interviews, conferences, busy calendars, strategic plans, annual reports.
Truly, the change agent in our lives was never anything named Sama, as much as you’d like to wish, Leila. It was the relationships Sama inspired. It was the daily, human, caring and kind interactions. We had to be together each day, because of Sama. It was the being with each other. Doing life together. Witness.
Thus, now,
I miss you…
and so,
I will do my best to remember you,
as you were,
to me.
I won’t remember you the way they describe. I refuse. I hope you understand, Leila. I hope it’s what you would want. I want to remember and preserve you as you truly were to me, in all your complexity — joys and pain. I owe that to you. I owe that to all you taught me. I must remember, including the tough parts. The really, really tough and complex parts.
But how do I mourn you, grieve your loss, and honor your legacy? How do I quantify the value of seeing someone who dressed like me, acted like me, talked like me — reaching for meaningful goals in business and accomplishing nearly all of her wildest dreams?
How do I explain what it meant to me, to witness you — a Harvard educated, one of a kind, early social entrepreneur and woman I admired so deeply, from so close? How do I believe in the future of social entrepreneurship, the future of society, the environment… and try my best to make the world a better place, without you in it?
Right now? You left us now, Leila? Fucking… me? In 2020? I’m left here now? With these people, in this dumpster fire? Without you?
2019 was one of the hardest years of my life too, you know… just like I imagine it was for you. I never got to speak with you about it. I barely spoke with anyone about it, for that matter, Leila.
But now I’m suddenly a part of the next generation? Now there’s some metaphorical baton floating somewhere in the air, Leila? How can I carry even an ounce of the incredible weight or bring any magnitude of the immense strength you brought into the world?
I don’t feel ready, Leila. I wasn’t ready to lose you.
I didn’t think cancer could ever take you, and oddly, simultaneously, I always knew we would lose you way too young. It’s been so shocking and not surprising at all.
For me, you were a woman who blurred the personal and the professional, who appreciated the subtle power of prose and diction, who demanded the utmost care for your grammar and your stories.
You appreciated brevity, no doubt, but I cannot and will not make you any less complex than you actually were. I will attempt to do justice to all that you were with the memories I will share here.
I had a unique and intimate, if not, quite brief, glimpse into who you were — your life and all of its component parts, as your close colleague for about 1.5 years. My role was to basically do everything and anything you needed or wanted, as much as I could, while you ran 3 non-profits and started 1 company simultaneously.
I served you to the best of my ability at the time, Leila, I really did.
That is to say…
I
chased
you,
girl.
I chased you so fucking hard, with all my might, Leila. I proudly became the first person to work so closely with you the longest, as your “Junior Chief of Staff” (adorable, right! We invented it together, you remember).
Eventually, when key Samasource funders fell through, and layoffs rippled across the organization — making it clear to both of us I could never become what we had dreamed up together, Leila — I trained Anna to beat and outlast even me.
Some of us know how much of a profound accomplishment it was just to keep up with you, all day, every day, even for a brief period of time. It was one of the wildest and most important adventures of my life so far. Beyond our work together, I want to believe I was one of your unacknowledged good friends, and trusted confidants.
I want to extend a virtual big hug to all those whose lives you touched. I hope to make those of us whose lives you touched deeply and closely feel a little more seen and understood.
I hope to eventually connect with some of your family, friends and colleagues past, present, and future, who I’ve interacted with undoubtedly but didn’t really know as much as I wanted to— even if it’s hard and not in the lightest or easiest of circumstances.
I hope you can still bring us all together, Leila.
I always wanted to know everything and everyone you knew, Leila. Embarrassing, but true. It’s selfish, but I still hope that can continue despite your death.
In all that I will do now and into the future, I hope I will make you proud.
I hope your vision, mission and values, can carry on in me and in the rest of us.
Here’s to you, Leila. Happy 1st birthday in Heaven.
I love you and miss you.
